Puerto Rico's Fossil Fuel Doublespeak

Last week, I broke the story that Puerto Rico was voluntarily dismissing its lawsuit against the fossil fuel industry.

If you've followed Heavy Weather for any length of time, you know I've been a little obsessed with Puerto Rico's climate lawsuits because of how clear-eyed they are about the ways anthropogenic climate change has ravaged the archipelago and who is causing the carnage:

As a result of the lies and deception of the Defendants and the fossil fuel industry, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico has incurred or will incur billions of dollars in costs to clean up climate change-induced disasters, such as Hurricanes Irma and Maria, and is anticipated to suffer additional substantial even more costly, damages in the future.

The billion dollar lawsuit was dropped late last Friday after the Trump administration started going after states' filing climate lawsuits and an industry front group sent a strongly worded letter to Republican Governor Jenniffer González Colón.

According to her head of public affairs, the lawsuit was dropped because Puerto Rico needs to "be aligned" with Trump and his energy politics because they can't take the risk of not falling in line with the White House and being a target for retaliation.

What the administration doesn't say in its justification is that the archipelago is already subservient to fossil capital, at great risk to the safety of its citizens. Blackouts are expected to quadruple this summer when compared to the same time last year. However, according to request for proposals to expand energy generation, methane gas is being given much higher priority over renewables, which studies have shown Puerto Rico could thrive with.

When you compare the contents of the lawsuits against our expanding fossil fuel infrastructure, the doublespeak makes it clear the Puerto Rican government understands what's causing the climate crisis and is hellbent on making sure they can continue lighting the fires leading us to hell.

Our energy crisis is often presented as an electric trolley problem. Either we suffer blackout after blackout and don’t harm the environment, or we continue burning fossil fuels and live with the mounting consequences. This framing is as duplicitous as it is disingenuous. When people are presented with only these two options, it's clear that many will choose the latter because "climate change" is a nebulous concept they do not see themselves having to face any time soon. But, there is a spider web of climate mitigation and adaptation solutions that are purposefully ignored because burning more fossil fuels makes a bunch of people a lot of money.

You can see this psychological off ramp being taken in real time during a Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations hearing. Resident Commissioner Pablo José Hernández — who’s the leader of the party that ostensibly opposes González Colón’s — asks experts about how to deal with the coming summer blackouts.

He said:

I’ll take whatever I can find in terms of energy sources to prevent power outages in the summer. Even if tomorrow we discover the dirtiest source of energy in the history of the world. Obviously, it doesn’t have to be that way. If we had to find a temporary solution to that generation problem, could renewables be an alternative?

Megan Gibson, attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, explained to an unconvinced Hernández that building renewable energy systems ahead of the summer would be “faster and cheaper, period, that’s what the evidence shows.” Previously, she had mentioned that renewables performed better in disasters and they could be scaled up effectively.[[1]]

Afterwards, he switched over to Glen Sweetnam of the Energy Policy Research Foundation, which has a “special emphasis” on the fossil fuel market. Sweetnam immediately suggests renting an LNG regasification barge over the summer. Hernández accepts the answer without any real pushback and mentions the government is already working on something similar.[[2]]

Away from the public – in private courtrooms in a language that many Puerto Ricans don't speak – our government implicitly understands the calamity hanging over our heads. Yet, when the cameras are rolling, the government pushes the fossil fuel industry as the only "solution" to our energy crisis while outright ignoring real solutions and disregarding the very real effects of climate change.

The subcommittee hearing is a prime example of how discourses of delay are used to slow climate action. These arguments don’t deny climate change, but they do serve to “disorient and discourage” movements towards renewable energy by saying that, for example, adapting to climate change would not require a radical transformation of our daily lives or that it is pointless to attempt to adapt because the world’s too far gone. The 12 discourses of climate delay fall neatly into four overarching strategies: redirect responsibility, push non-transformative solutions, emphasize the downsides, and surrender.

The Puerto Rican government and its fossil fuel leeches have used pretty much all of them to slow the transition to renewables. 

A 2024 Northeastern University that interviewed over 50 energy industry actors in Puerto Rico lays out how these discourse of delay are utilized in the archipelago.[[3]] The study analyzes how responsibility for the energy transition shifted from the government to the private sector, and how LNG energy is built up while renewables are torn down.

Discourses like Hernández’s — wherein “concerns about fossil fuel interests are minimized by focusing not on how electricity is generated but on making sure the people of Puerto Rico have access to reliable and resilient energy” — are disassembled within the study:

Appeals to social justice can be particularly powerful as a delay strategy because it is important to acknowledge the justice implications of energy transitions. For Puerto Rico, the most common concerns raised regarding social justice were energy costs and reliability and resilience of the system. Frequently, calls for reliability and resilience were used to explain why it was not desirable to transition quickly to a renewable system. These narratives posited reliability and resilience as priorities that were in tension with renewable production, without acknowledging that the current system, which is 97% fossil fuel based, is not reliable or resilient. Such concerns constitute a discourse of delay because they present potential downsides of climate action without comparative analysis of the potential downsides of a lack of action.

A community leader perfectly exemplified the outrage I feel when the Puerto Rican government does something it knows will eventually wreak havoc on us: 

I think that perhaps the thing that shocks me the most, what I find most incredible, is that absolutely nothing has been done to improve the system with renewable energy. What the government has done is to say, let’s go to a non-renewable energy that is cheaper than oil or less polluting than oil. But the reality is that gas also continues to be polluting and coal makes absolutely no sense and even garbage has also been considered.

One of the most important discourses of delay in Puerto Rico is exemplified by two other quotes. The first comes from an NGO member: “we need renewable energy and those are our goals, but first we have to make the transition to natural gas." And the second from a fossil fuel company employee: “renewable energy alone is not going to solve all the problems or be the solution for all the issues that are needed.”

This argument is ingenious because of how it cements the narrative that LNG must be built as a bridge to renewable energy. However, it's not a bridge. It's a barricade, meant so that nothing can get through once it's erected. It's fossil capital making sure the path they lay down only leads to their LNG-run power plants that assure they can keep their multibillion dollar contracts.

For example, Puerto Rico cut its' renewable energy goals that demanded 40% renewable by 2025 and 60% by 2040 citing that it was incongruent with our energy reality, which is only true because they have overtly funded fossil fuels instead of renewables. Because Puerto Rico is not able to build up renewable in the short-term, it will assuredly not reach long-term renewable goals, which are still on the books until the administration takes aim at those too.[[4]]

Lastly, interviews from the study "connected Puerto Rico's colonial status to delay," in the energy transition.

When González Colón dropped the lawsuit, it was under the guise of not being able to afford to lose any federal funding because we're just a tiny little archipelago that can't afford to be in Trump's crosshairs. There's no better argument for not doing something than saying you simply do not have the power to do what needs to be done.

Even though the Puerto Rican government has bent the knee to this demand and several others, the 2025-2026 fiscal budget is expected to go from 46% to 43%, a change that seems minor on paper but it will cause harrowing effects throughout the archipelago. Assuredly, the archipelago's administration will use Trump's executive order targeting climate change policies as justification for cutting or significantly scaling back any program that attempts to grapple with the warming world we live in. On top of all that, Trump cuts to FEMA and NOAA will reverberate across Puerto Rico come hurricane season, which will, ironically, be worsened by the continuing burning of fossil fuels.

It remains to be seen what the Trump administration will attack Puerto Rico's ability to survive, and how quickly the archipelago's government will acquiesce without resistance.

Puerto Rico is on the "frontlines of climate change" because its location in the Caribbean makes it a prime victim for worsening hurricanes and warming temperatures. A study from the Puerto Rico Committee of Experts and Advisors on Climate Change estimates that 2°C of warming above pre-industrial levels by 2050 could result in nearly 10,000 deaths and nearly $400 billion in damages. Meanwhile, a 4°C will lead to 22,081 deaths by 2050. These are conservative estimates, according to the study.[[5]]

The world is on track to 3.1°C of warming, according to the United Nations.

By continuing to burn fossil fuels instead of prioritizing a transition to renewable energy and not emphasizing plans to adapt to climate change, the government is not only making sure that your neighborhood floods but telling you to learn how to swim because lifeboats aren't coming.

[[1]]: Windmills were generating the largest amount of electricity in the immediate aftermath of the latest archipelago-wide blackout.

[[2]]: New Fortress Energy has a vessel “semipermanently moored” near San Juan that serves as a floating LNG storage unit that locals fear “might bring fiery death” because it doesn’t have a federally approved emergency plan.

[[3]]: If you're at all interested in learning more about this topic, I really recommend reading the study in its entirety. Very good at explaining how energy politics are perceived in Puerto Rico.

[[4]]: While researching this article, I ran across this dumbass story with horrible framing that claims Puerto Rico has reached about 27-30% renewable energy because those renewable projects have already been "assigned and are in line for construction over the next two years." Meanwhile, we're at about 7% actual renewable energy, according to the Energy Information Agency. This framing is particularly dangerous because people will announce projects like this and not follow through with them at all but still use them as justification that things are headed in the right direction.

[[5]]: Personally, I think these estimates are very conservative. It's also not immediately clear to me if this takes into account deaths from climate disasters and other situations that will inevitably be affected by rising temperatures.